Then, with a long, loud sniff, that seemed to indicate that she had made up her mind, she said:"l'll take the position."

"For all the world,"as Mrs. Banks said to her husband later, "as though she were doing us an honour."

-MARY POPPINS

CHAPTER  ONE

Nanny for Sale

"Hi, this is Alexis at the Parents League. I'm just calling to follow up on the uniform guidelines we sent over . .." The blond woman volunteering behind the reception desk holds up a bejeweled finger, signaling me to wait while she continues on the phone. "Yes, well, this year we'd really like to see all your girls in longer skirts, at least twenty inches. We're still getting complaints from the mothers at the boys' schools in the vicinity... Great. Good to hear it. Bye." With a grand gesture she crosses the word "Spence" off her list of three items.

She returns her attention to me. "I'm sorry to keep you waiting. With the school year starting we're just crazed." She draws a big circle around the second item on her list, "paper towels." "Can I help you?"

"I'm here to put up an ad for a nanny, but the bulletin board seems to have moved," I say, slightly confused as I've been advertising here since I was thirteen.

"We had to take it down while the foyer was being painted and never got around to moving it back. Here, let me show you." She leads me to the central room, where mothers perch at Knoll desks fielding inquiries about the Private Schools. Before me sits the full range of Upper East Side diversity-half of the women are dressed in Chanel suits and Manolo Blahniks, half are in six-hundred-dollar barn jackets, looking as if they might be asked to pitch an Aqua Scutum tent at any moment.

Alexis gestures to the bulletin board, which has displaced a Mary Cassatt propped against the wall. "It's all a bit disorganized at the moment," she says as another woman looks up from the floral arrangement she's rearranging nearby. "But don't worry. Tons of lovely girls come here to look for employment, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding someone." She raises her hand to her pearls. "Don't you have a son at Buckley? You look so familiar. I'm Alexis-"

"Hi," I say. "I'm Nan. Actually, I took care of the Oleason girls. I think they lived next door-to you."

She arches an eyebrow to give me a once-over. "Oh... Oh, Nanny, that's right," she confirms for herself, before retreating back to her desk.

I tune out the officious, creamy chatter of the women behind me to read the postings put up by other nannies also in search of employment.

Babysitter need children

very like kids

vacuums

I look your kids

Many years work

You call me

The bulletin board is already so overcrowded with flyers that, with a twinge of guilt, I end up tacking my ad over someone else's pink paper festooned with crayon flowers, but spend a few minutes ensuring that I'm only covering daisies and none of her pertinent information.

I wish I could tell these women that the secret to nanny advertising isn't the decoration, it's the punctuation-it's all in the exclamation mark. While my ad is a minimalist three-by-five card, without so much as a smiley face on it, I liberally sprinkle my advertisement with exclamations, ending each of my desirable traits with the promise of a beaming smile and unflagging positivity.

Nanny at the Ready! Chapin School alumna available weekdays part-time!

Excellent references! Child Development Major at NYU!

The only thing I don't have is an umbrella that makes me fly.

I do one last quick check for spelling, zip up my backpack, bid Alexis adieu, and jog down the marble steps out into the sweltering heat.

As I walk down Park Avenue the August sun is still low enough in the sky that the stroller parade is in full throttle. I pass many hot little people, looking resignedly uncomfortable in their sticky seats. They are too hot even to hold on to any of their usual traveling companions-blankies and bears are tucked into back stroller pockets. I chuckle to myself at the child who waves away the offer of a juice box with a flick of the hand and a toss of the head that says, "I couldn't possibly be bothered with juice right now."

Waiting at a red light, I look up at the large glass windows that are the eyes of Park Avenue. From a population-density point of view, this is the Midwest of Manhattan. Towering above me are rooms-rooms and rooms and rooms. And they are empty. There are powder rooms and dressing rooms and piano rooms and guest rooms and, somewhere above me, but I won't say where, a rabbit named Arthur has sixteen feet square all to himself.

I cut across Seventy-second Street, passing under the shade of the blue awnings of the Polo mansion, and turn into Central Park.

Pa

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